It is desirable to insure that the correct advertisement is performed by radio and television broadcasters in accordance with contractual representations agreed upon between the broadcaster and the advertiser. Important to this performance is content compliance in performance contracts where multiple content elements are involved and the performance contract, known within the broadcast industry as an “Insertion Order,” requires the broadcast of a specific advertising content element, known within the industry as a “commercial” or “spot” to be performed during a certain period of time on a date or range of dates specified in the Insertion Order.
Previously, this process has been performed manually with unreliable results. For example, an individual manually causes a digital audio file containing the commercial content to be downloaded into a radio broadcaster's broadcast production database, which contains all other commercial content and programming content to be performed by the radio station on upcoming broadcasts. Human error may cause the identity of the content to be confused, misidentified, or through typographical error mis-attributed. The result of this error may be the failure of the broadcaster to comply with the terms and conditions of the Insertion Order and the loss of revenues resultant from that failure.
This sequence of events are compounded in the present radio and television broadcast environment, where a number of radio or television stations are owned and operated by a single entity, known within the broadcast industry as a “Group.” In Groups, advertisements are frequently ordered from a location other than the individual broadcast station. Also frequently, the result is a lack of coordination between the ordering and execution processes.
Although a system such as that described above is typically sufficient for the particular purposes for which they were designed and used in individual broadcast stations, they suffer from typical human errors and certain discontinuities when applied to the complex systems of Group advertising sales and purchase ordering.